I’m adding Literature Map to The Best Places To Get Blog, Website, , Book, Movie, & Music Recommendations.

With Literature Map, you type in the name of an author, and you then see a “cloud” of authors.  Those names that are closest to your search term in the center are those who are most similar.

I’m not really sure what data they use to determine the similarities, but in my tests it looked good to me.

Not only would this would be useful to teachers, but I could see that my ninth-grade mainstream students might find this web tool an engaging way to explore new books.